Yesterday at the grocery store a young man standing near the entrance tried to hand me a flyer as I grabbed a cart and pivoted toward the door.  I gave it right back.  His mistake was not following the advice of former Wisconsin Congressman Tom Petri.

That wisdom is relayed by Alexandra Petri, his daughter and a Washington Post columnist, in her book “A Field Guide to Awkward Silences.”  She talks about being a kid on the campaign trail and how their team would hand out Packers schedules at parades.

“I always find that if you say ‘Have a thing,’ they don’t know what it is, so they take it!”

The guy at Giant gave me the flyer while explaining that it had to do with purchasing steamed crabs.  That gave me the opportunity to awkwardly hand it back to someone who wasn’t ready, setting off a fumble and near drop of said piece of paper that was useless to this non-seafood eater.

Petri’s book covers a lot of what it is to grow up, find your things and move through a world that at times finds those things (and you) odd.  Interspersed throughout is all kinds of wry humor and experiences like not having any modeling experience or serious aspiration to model and applying for America’s Next Top Model.

Her responses for that last one reminded me of my application for The Bachelor:

“‘What would bother you most about living in a house with nine to thirteen other people?’ (‘Not knowing more specifically the number of people in the house.’)”

Petri talks about how great stories come from times when things don’t go as planned and you end up looking like an idiot, and the fact that in the grand historical scheme of things we have solved so many big life problems that we end up worrying about things that are not exactly life-threatening.

“Embarrassing ourselves in front of strangers is literally one of the worst things that can happen to us,” she says.   “It’s in the slot where polio used to be.”

Somehow we arrive at adulthood where other people see a person who looks like an adult and give us a frightening lack of supervision:

“The odd thing is that nobody stops you,” Petri writes.  “I can rent a car.  I can vote and walk into an office and — doesn’t anyone notice that I am secretly twelve?”

She has much more insight on our modern world and how we perceive success and attention, plus what it’s like to be a public writer — specifically a female one and the challenge of being judged on looks first.

Finally I have to thank her for sharing this take on Statuary Hall, which she says is her favorite part of the U.S. Capitol.

“Apart from Will [Rogers] and Bob [La Follette], my favorites were the statues from Hawaii — the big statue of King Kamehameha with gold trim that was always garlanded in leis, and the big boxy statue of someone called Father Damien who looked like a deranged refrigerator.”

This was one of those things I marked to go back and Google later just to see the picture, and I could not have been any more pleased with the outcome.  Seriously, check out the Father Damien statue.

Publishers put lots of focus on book covers in order to grab the attention of readers, but there’s a far better way to basically guarantee I pick up your book: deckle edge pages.

Granted, they have nothing to do with the words printed on the pages themselves, but for some reason the deckle design instantly makes me feel positive.

At a bookstore in D.C. earlier this year I stood in front of the section for one of my favorite authors, Paul Auster, trying to decide which of his works to tackle next.  They had about eight of his novels, but the only one with deckle edges made the decision no contest.

“Moon Palace” was not my favorite Auster work, but I did enjoy the story of M.S. Fogg’s experience sabotaging and rebuilding his life through adventures accompanied and inspired by a somewhat crazy old man.

Auster always has great detail that shows how much research he puts into his settings.  Fogg has an uncle named Victor who plays the clarinet and is in a few different bands during his life.  Fogg talks about one iteration, called the Moon Men, dropping a reference that is not about a singer named Taylor, yet in a modern reading actually kind of fits.

“There was no question they had put together an original act, and when I went to see them perform the next night, the songs struck me as a revelation — filled with humor and spirit, a boisterous form of mayhem that mocked everything from politics to love.  Victor’s lyrics had a jaunty, dittylike flavor to them, but the underlying tone was almost Swiftian in its effect.”

Apologies to Jonathan, but Swiftian is only going in one direction in terms of cultural understanding, and it’s not back toward the 18th century.

In terms of aphorisms and general wisdom, Uncle Victor is second only to the old man named Thomas Effing, for whom Fogg works in the second half of the book.  Victor is largely responsible for raising Fogg and clearly has a desire to impart as much as he can on the kid.  That includes wonderful baseball analogies.

“As Uncle Victor had once told me long ago, a conversation is like having a catch with someone.  A good partner tosses the ball directly into your glove, making it almost impossible for you to miss it; when he is on the receiving end, he catches everything sent his way, even the most errant and incompetent throws.”

While working for Effing, Fogg is sent on a journey to a museum, which Effing notes was designed by Stanford White, who also designed the buildings at Fogg’s university and was involved in a salacious and true story involving a girl and a murder at Madison Square Garden.

Effing also talks about Thomas Moran, who he says helped talk him into a trip out west that plays a big part in the story.  I flagged this page because I was vaguely sure Moran had feature pieces in what I consider the coolest room in Washington.  A quick search confirmed that yes, his works are part of the second floor salon at the Renwick Gallery across the street from the White House.  Sadly they are majorly changing the room during a renovation, but wouldn’t it be an amazing place to play whiffle ball?

My final note on this book is one of pure coincidence.  I do the bulk of my reading on the train to work, and one night before heading out I was watching The Simpsons during dinner.  In the episode, Lisa is invited to join Mensa and told to go to an address on Euclid Street.

Then half an hour later in “Moon Palace” Fogg says about Effing, “Every morning he would test himself by walking down Euclid Avenue at rush hour…”

Before two weeks ago, I did not know John Steinbeck was a war correspondent in World War II. I learned that while reading “Once There Was A War,” a collection of pieces he filed during that time.

Steinbeck went to Europe in 1943, which was several years after “The Grapes of Wrath” shot him to stardom and he won the Pulitzer Prize for literature. Needless to say, this is not the kind of career move we see these days.

The book is a fascinating way to look at the war, stripping away the usual nuts and bolts of battle that you might find in a typical World War II collection. Instead, what we have is Steinbeck’s style of painting vivid pictures of characters and situations that put you in that space.

My favorite example of a Steinbeck description is the third chapter in “The Grapes of Wrath” where he spends a few pages showing in intimate detail a turtle crossing a road. In this book, an emblematic piece involves soldiers massed on a transport ship.

“There are several ways of wearing a hat or a cap. A man may express himself in the pitch or tilt of his hat, but not with a helmet. There is only one way to wear a helmet. It won’t go on any other way. It sits level on the head, low over the eyes and ears, low on the back of the neck. With your helmet on you are a mushroom in a bed of mushrooms.”

This is what I love about the book. Steinbeck talks about certain operational things, but really it’s about the soldier’s experience with waiting, with equipment, with each other.

Oh and a goat. More specifically, Wing Commander William Goat of the Royal Air Force, who is described in a chapter titled “Alcoholic Goat.”

“This goat has only one truly bad habit. He loves beer, and furthermore is able to absorb it in such quantities that even the mild, nearly non-alcoholic English beer can make him tipsy. In spite of orders to the contrary he is able to seek out the evil companions who will give him beer. Once inebriated, he is prone to wander about sneering. He sneers at the American Army Air Force, he sneers at the Labor party, and once he sneered at Mr. Churchill.”

We can’t help but see this goat sidling up to a certain guy who scratches him behind the ear, makes sure a supervisor isn’t looking, then leads him over to the stash of beer. And then they sneer at Churchill together, because of course.

Obviously I recommend everything in the Steinbeck library, but this one is a unique look at war told in what amounts to a bunch of short stories only a few pages long but full of detail and insight.